Car insurance refused, cancelled or voided

Let’s be honest, it’s never a good thing if your car insuranceprovider cancels your policy – it’s the equivalent of being dumped, which is never fun. To top it all off, your insurance provider’s unlikely to sugar coat it with “it’s not you, it’s me”. It’s pretty much always going to feel like you’ve done something wrong – even if you haven’t.

There could be a number of reasons and it usually boils down to three main areas: non-payment, non-disclosure and fraud. As serious as all three sound, sometimes errors occur that are no more than admin oversights and genuine mistakes. But regardless of the reasons why your insurance has been cancelled, don’t bury your head in the sand – being in denial never helped anybody.

Cause for cancellation

If you’ve not been paying your premiums, then your provider has a right to cancel your policy, but they should provide you with sufficient warning that this is what they’ll do. If you don’t think you can meet an upcoming payment, contact your insurance provider – you might come to a mutually agreeable arrangement.

Non-disclosure could be down to miscommunication and it could be as simple as you forgetting to declare a claim you made a couple of years ago. Insurance providers can validate policyholders’ claims history and check records of reported incidents using the central insurance database known as CUE. So if you’ve genuinely forgotten to mention something which later gets found out, then your policy can be cancelled for failing to declare relevant information.

Insurance is all about risk and prices are based on your individual circumstances. So if you’re a high risk candidate who has made claims in the past, your premiums are going to reflect that. It’s imperative so tell your insurance provider about any previous claims and incidents. You’ll usually be asked about driving convictions and claims so answer honestly – the truth always catches up, so you may as well be upfront.

Fraud

It sounds like a biggie and something that most of us would never dream of doing. But fraud in an insurance provider’s world might not seem that bad in real terms. Fronting, for example (where a more experienced driver says they’re the main driver in order to save money on a young drivers policy) is considered insurance fraud but for lots of law-abiding parents of teenage drivers this is probably a very real scenario. As tempting as a tiny white lie seems, don’t do it because there are consequences for all the drivers involved that just aren’t worth it.

How does a cancellation affect future policies?

Insurance cancellation is something you’ll have to declare with every new insurance provider. A cancelled policy serves as a red flag and you may struggle to find a mainstream insurance provider to cover you. Alternatively, you may end up paying a lot more for your policy.

The best way to avoid cancellation is to be as truthful as possible with your insurance provider. Also, insurance has a long memory and whilst a criminal conviction can be spent after a length of time, insurance claims and cancellations can’t. So that cancelled policy from ten years ago? Well you’ll still have to declare that five years from now.

Search for a policy

The moral of the story is that honesty is always the best policy with insurance. And when it comes to renewing and finding an insurance provider to cover you, look no further than right here, we can search more than a hundred insurance providers – it’s so easy when you comparethemarket.com

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